


creature comforts

by sublime_jumbles



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Comfort Eating, Depression, Flashbacks, Gen, Oliver also needs therapy in a bad way, Oliver is sad and eats a lot of cheese fries, One Shot, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Weight Gain, binge eating, chubby!Oliver, good thing there's a crossover for that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-17 02:10:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3511328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sublime_jumbles/pseuds/sublime_jumbles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It’s all anyone tells him the first few days after his rescue, once he’s been discharged from the hospital and cleared by the psych ward, shaky and skittish and cowed by normalcy. Eat something, Oliver, did you have enough, there’s more if you want it, eat something eat something eat something.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>set in a vague au in which oliver needs a recovery period between being rescued from lian yu and becoming the arrow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	creature comforts

**Author's Note:**

> ostensibly a gift for stevita on tumblr but it's as much self-indulgent trash as anything else i've written  
> \--  
> depression cw // anxiety cw // ptsd cw // food/overeating cw // very very very brief emetophobia cw

It’s all anyone tells him the first few days after his rescue, once he’s been discharged from the hospital and cleared by the psych ward, shaky and skittish and cowed by normalcy. _Eat something, Oliver, did you have enough, there’s more if you want it, eat something eat something eat something._

His first meal at home goes down easy, comes up fast. His mother tuts over him, instructs Raisa to bring him a cool towel for his forehead and a glass of ginger ale. “Too much too soon,” she says. “It will get easier.”

Eating does get easier, but the curve of everything else is much steeper. He can’t sleep, lies awake cringing at the moonlight through his window, pulling his blankets around him in a cocoon, feeling like he’s sinking through his mattress. He’s had to ask his mother to stop knocking on his door in the morning, because the sharp sound has consistently sent him out of a doze and into a panic. Everything that was once familiar is stark and confusing and frightening: his mother is remarried; she feels colder to his touch than she used to. Thea is an adult now, sharper and brasher and angrier than he remembers. Laurel and Tommy have grown, moved on, made lives for themselves, and Oliver can’t make toast without cowering when the lever pops. He can’t hold a knife without being afraid of what he’ll do with it. Thunderstorms reduce him to a trembling wreck in the corner, flashing so hard he doesn’t know where he is. He feels too feral for this, and he doesn’t know how to domesticate himself again.

 But food is familiar. Food is plentiful; it makes him sleepy, docile. When his appetite returns, he convinces himself that he’s just making up for five years of starvation. He asks Raisa for seconds of almost every meal, and she delivers them with a smile and a tousle of his hair, sometimes a kiss on the cheek. This is good, he tells himself. It’s good that he’s eating. 

\---

He’s been home for a week when the dreams get so bad that he slips downstairs, still unfurling himself from the tight bind of a night terror, and grabs a pint of ice cream to steady his quaking hands. He takes it to bed and curls himself as small as he can, and spoons mint chocolate chip into his mouth until his stomach begins to protest. He thinks it’s a little pathetic that his neglected stomach thinks this is a lot of food – he used to be able to put away pints like nothing in college – but he pushes himself until he finishes. His stomach whines and aches and churns, but the pain dulls the bite of the nightmare, and when he finally slips back into sleep, it’s dreamless. 

\---

A week later, Tommy takes him out to catch up - nowhere fancy, per Oliver’s request. He’s not used to being in public yet, and if he loses his shit it’ll be at least a little less humiliating to do it at a burger joint rather than somewhere upscale. 

“So tell me about the island,” says Tommy once they’ve ordered, sitting forward. His eyes are bright and interested, and Oliver fidgets, digs his fingernails into the meat of his thigh. It’s very loud in restaurant, hard to parse the sounds for danger. There are too many people, too much unfamiliarity. He marks the exits in his head, gauges their distance from himself.

His stomach growls, and he cranes his neck for their waitress. “Not much to tell,” he lies. “A lot of it blurs together.” 

Tommy’s brow furrows. “Oh. Nothing exciting happened? Not in five years?”

Oliver's brain flickers, and he gives his head a little shake to clear it. He sips his water, hopes Tommy can’t tell he’s fighting to keep his composure. “It’s the first time in five years that I don’t have to think about it, you know? Tell me about you. Has anything exciting happened to you?”

Tommy looks disappointed, but with a little more prodding, he launches into a story about college, and Oliver exhales. He doesn’t want to talk about the island, first of all, but since he got home he’s found it’s difficult to think about at all – like he’s remembering everything through a thick fog, like a dream just out of reach when he wakes up. The therapist who screened him in the psych ward said that might happen, that it’s normal to distance himself from trauma. He still has the business card somewhere; he wishes he wasn’t too triggered by the therapist's name to call him.

His stomach whines again, and when the waitress places his double cheeseburger in front of him, he attacks it with such fervor that Tommy stops talking to stare.

“None of those on the island, huh?” he says, and Oliver nods, mouth full. His appetite isn’t quite back to a hundred percent yet, and he knows he’ll feel a little sick after he finishes, but his hands will stop shaking, and it’ll be easier to think straight.

“Finish your story,” he says after he swallows. “What happened with the cactus? You can’t start a story like that and not tell me the ending.” 

Tommy grins full-out, and Oliver’s chest swells with nostalgia. “That fuckin’ cactus,” Tommy says, shaking his head, and he gets so engrossed in telling the story that he doesn’t comment on the way Oliver practically inhales the rest of his burger and fries.

\---

He feels like a child again, except not in the happy, carefree way. More of the learning-how-to-sleep-through-the-whole-night, easily-frightened, trying-not-to cry-all-the-time way.

Thea wakes him up one morning for a dentist appointment, poking him through his blankets, and in seconds he’s on his feet, pinning her to the wall, hands clasped around her throat.

“Ollie,” she chokes, eyes wide, and the switch flips in his brain and he leaps backward in horror.

“I’m sorry,” he rasps, sinking onto his bed. “I’m so sorry, Speedy, I don’t know -”

Her face tells him that she doesn’t recognize him, that she’s finally realized that whoever came home in her brother’s body is not really her brother.

He skips the dentist appointment, because if he couldn’t handle his sister touching him he thinks he definitely can’t handle some stranger putting their hands into his mouth. Instead, he pays off his driver to leave him in the parking lot and walks six blocks to the burger joint, orders a plate of cheese fries, and pushes each one into his mouth without tasting. He keeps his head down, grateful that he’s almost unrecognizable to anyone who might have known him five years ago. No more baby face, no more shaggy hair, no more wide-legged sprawl when he sits. He keeps himself pulled in tight now, makes himself small.

“Easy there, hon,” says his waitress, coming up behind him, and he startles. So damn jumpy; he’s grateful his hands are busy or he might have swung at her. “No one’s going to take it away from you.” 

Oliver nods, swallows, sips his water. The restaurant is bustling; he feels entirely separate from it, like he’s watching it rather than sitting inside. He decides that he isn’t leaving until he can breathe again.

He orders another plate of fries and makes himself uncoil, muscle by muscle. He adds the sounds he can distinguish in his head, divides them by normal vs. dangerous, regroups, comes up short. There’s nothing he can immediately identify as danger - and of fucking course not, he reasons, it’s a burger joint. But once he’s examined them all in his head - cars starting and driving, utensils clinking and plates clattering, hot oil sizzling and people talking - he feels less edgy. There is nothing out of the ordinary here; these are the sounds of living. This is how it sounds to be around people who don’t want to kill him or torture him or even bother him. 

He takes a deep breath. A sip of water. Cleans his plate. Flags down the waitress to ask her for another. 

“I’m cutting you off after this,” she tells him, only half playful. “You’re gonna make yourself sick, hon.”

Oliver does his best to laugh, but it’s rusty. He eats the third plate slowly, feeling his stomach stretch with every bite, feeling his anxiety drop. By the time he’s finished, his breathing is deep and even, and the weight of his full belly keeps him centered. For the first time since he landed back in Starling, he feels like being human again is a possibility.

\--- 

He tries not to look in the mirror when he can help it. Too many scars, too many traumas carved into him. He undresses with his eyes closed, showers with the lights off. The house is too bright anyway, more artificial light than his eyes are used to.

He knows he’s getting soft. There’s no way he can eat the way he's been eating without putting on a few, and it’s been weeks since he did anything more physical than walk between the house to the car, or the car and the burger joint. He wouldn’t say he likes it, necessarily; he just doesn’t have the energy to hate it. Everything he truly hates about his body is permanent, burnt into his skin or stitched up with scars.

He knows he’d look a little less pathetic if he made an effort to get dressed beyond a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants shoved into his boots when he goes out, but comfort is his priority these days, not appearances. He’d forgotten the luxury of having a clean pair of sweats for every day of the week, and he’s not going to deny himself that pleasure. Part of him is dreading the day he tries to get into his jeans or his suit trousers only to find that they no longer fit over his hips or button under his belly, but a bigger part of him is dreading that day because putting on Real People Clothes means he’ll have to do Real People Things, and even though he’s been feeling a little better, it’s still hard to imagine settling back into a normal routine again. His mother has been dropping hints about an open position at the company, and Oliver knows without a doubt that he cannot handle that yet. He can barely get himself out of bed by noon every morning, and that’s after the nights he manages to sleep. He can’t fit into any of his suits, he’s reasonably sure of that, and spending an afternoon at the tailor’s to get them let out sounds like a hands-on version of hell.

He towels off, keeping his eyes firmly away from the mirror. Someday, he thinks. Not today.

\---

He starts coming by the burger joint more often. It helps to sit among people he doesn’t know, acclimate himself to public space again. He gets better at not startling when cars drive over the pothole outside, when one of the workers drops a tray, when other customers burst out laughing. The staff gets used to seeing him perched on a barstool, halfway through his second or third plate of cheese fries, sometimes with a milkshake thrown in if he’s feeling especially indulgent or off-kilter. It becomes his refuge of choice, because unlike home, no one bothers him here. The waiters and waitresses check in on him every now and then, but there are no questions, no prodding, no pressure. He’s free to sit and learn himself again, and the more often he does it, the more comfortable he feels. He finds that the more time he takes to mellow himself, to take a mental inventory of how he’s doing, the longer the comfortable feeling lasts. He can get through whole days without an anxiety attack, sometimes even without a flashback, and he’s proud of that even though sometimes it takes him three plates of cheese fries to get there.

\--- 

Oliver knows he needs to stop ordering takeout at two am.

Holding his composure during the day is one thing, but the nights don't get any easier, no matter how many cheese fries he consumes in the afternoon. He still wakes up sweating, screaming, shaking. On the worst nights he doesn't recognize his room when he wakes up.

But when he's full it's easier to sleep through the night. Sometimes it’s the only way he can sleep, the heaviness in his stomach grounding him, helping him stabilize.

Not many places in Starling are open so late, but there’s a pizza place downtown that stays open until two every morning, and a Chinese one that’s only open late on weekends. He tries to justify it to himself, that maybe he’s making the late-night delivery drivers’ shifts worthwhile by tipping them so generously, but the shame that crowds in his throat when he slinks down to retrieve the order makes it feel more pitiful than generous. _Thanks for coming out at two a.m. because I have no coping skills; here’s enough to ensure that you won’t tell anyone about Oliver Queen’s comfort-eating habit._

He guesses it is a coping skill, kind of, just not a very healthy one.

\---

“Why don’t you go for a walk, Oliver?” his mother asks. “That might be good for you.”

Oliver’s stomach turns. He’s already nursing a gentle stomachache from a little too much breakfast and his first cup of coffee since he got back. He hasn’t shaved today, or showered, or even dressed beyond an undershirt and sweats and his bathrobe. His hands are shaky and he doesn’t feel like he’s in any shape to get off the couch, never mind leave the house. He makes a mental note: no more coffee. So far he doesn’t feel any of the benefits he remembers, just extra jitters and stomach pains, both of which he has enough of already.

“Stretch your legs,” his mother continues, ruffling his hair as she passes. “Get some exercise, clear your head. It’ll be good for you to get out of the house.”

Being in public at Big Belly is one thing; there are walls to shield him from the clamor of the street, the wails and yips of passing sirens, from all the loud, scary parts of the world he hasn’t learned how to deal with yet.

“Maybe tomorrow,” he manages, like any of this might change by then.

\---

Laurel comes into the burger joint one afternoon as he's lingering over a milkshake. The initial jolt of recognition tugs a deep ache from his bones, a visceral nostalgia that tempts him to get her attention.

Then he remembers that he owes her an apology, owes her the biggest fucking apology the world has ever seen, and he is in no shape to do that today, not even with the milkshake and a double burger sitting heavy in his stomach. He pulls on the hood of his sweatshirt, shrinks inside himself.

She orders a strawberry shake for herself at the counter, tapping the toe of her sneaker against the floor as she waits. Guilt squirms inside him, thick and bilious, and he tries to calm the squall with a gulp of milkshake.

It hits his stomach wrong, and he hiccups loudly. She turns, eyes sharp, and her gaze lands on him for a moment, raking over his face, down his body. He averts his eyes, focuses on his empty plate, and when he dares to glance back, her attention is on her phone.

He deflates in relief. He hasn't shaved all week, and he realizes she's never seen him with a beard before.

He finishes his milkshake, and can't help but watch the roll of her hips, the confidence in her step as she leaves. He misses that, misses having someone strong to cling to, wishes he still had someone to rub his belly, stroke his hair like she used to whenever he was hungover. Someone to take the edge off his loneliness. 

He swallows a grim little laugh. Too bad he can't bear for anyone to touch him.

\--- 

The first time Oliver gives himself a real, bona fide, can’t-get-off-the-couch stomachache, it’s with forty dollars’ worth of Chinese food from the place downtown.

He wakes up in the middle of the night to find Shado and Slade pacing around his room like sentries, whispering his name like a curse, and drags in breath after breath, curling in on himself. The clock on his nightstand tells him that it’s only quarter past midnight, and he almost cries at the realization that he’s only been asleep for twenty minutes. He gives himself another ten to see if he can beat the dream, or the hallucination, or whatever it is, and when he can’t, he rolls over and calls Feng Dynasty. He tacks egg rolls and General Tso’s onto his usual order of lo mein and dumplings, creeps downstairs to get it and tips the delivery girl with four fifties. He’s been trying to pay with cash more often; less proof of his pitiful coping habits on his bank statement that way.

He scarfs the food down until the ghosts fade back into the walls, and wakes up in the daylight with a cramp pulled so tight in his stomach that he can barely breathe without yelping.

He struggles into one of his old fraternity hoodies to hide his swollen belly and slowly hauls himself to the couch in the living room, where Slade and Shado are less likely to return. He tells his mother and Thea that it’s a migraine, that he thinks he’s just not used to the lights in his room yet.

His mother brings him some Excedrin and coffee – the caffeine will help it work faster, she says, and he groans at the thought of the stomach pains it gave him last time on top of the stomachache he already has.

“Too nauseated?” his mother asks gently, tousling his hair, and he nods, pulling a throw pillow to his belly and swallowing a whimper. Better to have her think that than figure out he’s only in pain because he spent the night stuffing himself. 

She studies him for a moment, and he resists the urge to slip a hand beneath the pillow and rub at his belly. “How about water instead?” she asks, and he nods again.

He tries to sit up when she brings him a glass, and realizes that there’s so much food in his stomach that he can’t bend at the waist.

“Hurts too much,” he manages, and she gives him another long look before nodding and leaving the pills and water on the coffee table. Once she’s gone, he squirms his way to the edge of the couch so he can reach the table and swallows the pills with some water, hoping maybe it’ll take the edge off the cramps in his belly. He hiccups, and groans at the way it jostles his stomach, slipping a hand under his hoodie to rub at it. It helps a little, but it makes him burp, and that hurts too. 

It’s a few more hours before he can move semi-comfortably again, and he swears to himself that this is the last time he lets it get this bad.  

\--- 

Oliver isn’t always aware of how much space he takes up, but some days, like today, he’s hyperconscious of the way the waistband of his sweats digs into him, the way his stomach rolls over it a little, soft beneath his T-shirt. It’s early afternoon, and the burger joint is bustling, hot, so he’s stripped off his usual protective hoodie layer. He feels exposed, and he hunches himself up more than usual on his barstool.

He’s trying to make his way through the paper - he woke up too anxious to do it this morning - when a familiar voice cuts through the clamor of the restaurant, and he turns to see Thea strolling in with a gaggle of her friends in tow. He ducks his head, tries to make himself invisible - he’ll embarrass her, the way he looks now.

He nibbles at a fry and fidgets, and full-out jumps when Thea says, "Ollie?"

He turns sheepishly, balling his napkin in his hand. "Oh, hey, Speedy. I didn't see you come in."

"Is this where you've been hanging out?" she asks, cocking her head. Her friends hang back, murmuring to each other, and he feels his face flush.

"Yeah," he manages. "It's, uh. It's familiar, you know?"

She smirks. "Well, you might want to cool it on the cheese fries," she says, snagging one off his plate. "You're starting to put the big belly in 'Big Belly Burger.'"

She flicks the swell of his side where it's beginning to spill over his waistband and gives him a pointed look, then clicks back to her friends, who turn and stare at him long after they've adjourned to their booth.

He finishes his fries with his back to them, one hand discreetly massaging at the dull ache in his stomach. He ordered the first plate with chili, and it's sitting heavier in his belly than he thought. Two plates might be enough today - he didn't snap when Thea snuck up on him, so he must be in an okay place.

But damn if she's not right, he thinks, pressing two fingers gently into his stomach. It's firm, full beneath the layer of fat, and he squints down at it where it hangs a little into his lap. Maybe he should think about taking care of that. If he’s going to avenge his father by taking out all those names in that tiny book, he’s going to need to be in better shape than this.

He tries to imagine fitting an exercise regime into his life and is exhausted by even the thought. Getting into shape requires a lot more mental stamina than he has right now.

\---

In the mirror that night, he makes eye contact with himself. His face is full now, like it used to be. His cheeks are pink; he thinks he looks healthy, until he looks down.

He can see the roll of his belly through his shirt, when he drops his gaze. He can see the indent of his navel sunk into the fabric, and he runs a hand over it experimentally. He frowns – so soft, so vulnerable – and bounces on his toes, makes himself keep watching. His belly jiggles a little, and he cringes. He thinks of how much this would have weighed him down on the island, how it would have thrown off his center of gravity when he was fighting.

He squeezes a handful through his shirt but can't bring himself to look at it bare. This is better, he tells himself. It means he's safe, that he can afford to look like this. This is good.

\---

His mother sits down across the table one morning as he’s plowing through a stack of Raisa’s pancakes and skimming the newspaper. Sometimes reading the news kicks up his anxiety more than he can handle first thing in the morning, but when he wakes up feeling halfway decent he likes to test himself. The pancakes help.

“Oliver,” she says, and he glances up at her, fork halfway to his mouth.

“Are you ... all right?” she asks, and the wrinkles between her eyebrows pinch together.

Oliver doesn’t know the answer to that one.

She shifts in her seat. Oliver hasn’t seen his mother look so uncomfortable since before the island.

“Do you think you might be depressed, sweetheart?” she asks finally, and he drops his gaze.

Oliver considers this. It occurs to him that he has no idea how to tell. He’s lost all his markers for happiness over the past five years. He’s getting better at recognizing comfort; contentment is a different story. A good day on the island meant shelter and safety and food and not having his life actively threatened. But here those things are taken for granted, and it’s disorienting to try to define happiness without them. It’s so strange to find himself in a world where things that seemed like luxuries on the island are considered guarantees, creature comforts.

“I don’t know,” he replies after several moments of deliberation, and he’s not as horrified as he thinks he should be when his voice cracks.

She reaches across the table and covers his hand with hers. “I heard you come downstairs last night,” she says softly. “A few nights this week.”

He feels his face heat, drops his gaze.

“I’m worried about you,” she says. “Wherever you're hurting, food isn't going to make it go away."

"I know," he says, head down. "I know it's not healthy. I know I need to stop. It's just ..."

She waits.

It's just so easy to drown himself in food, to let the weight in his belly distract his from the churning of his brain, to decide that he wants to hurt this way instead of that way. The pain of stuffing himself with pizza or cheese fries or snack cakes or dumplings is far preferable to the pain of watching his father shoot himself again and again, or reliving Yao Fei's and Shado's executions, or being tortured by Slade on an endless loop.

"I'm going to call the therapist," he finishes. "This week. I have his card."

"I think that's a good idea, sweetheart," his mother says, squeezing his hands. "Mr. Wilson is one of the best trauma counselors in the country. I think it would be good for you to start seeing him."

Oliver feels himself pale at the name, has to recalibrate as he tries to attach it to the idea of the therapist.

"Yeah," he says finally. "I'm going to call him."

\---

He bites the bullet and lifts his shirt. His belly is soft and pale, rounding out over the waist of his boxers; his sides nip in at his waist and then gently curve out again. His thighs are bigger too, brushing a little against each other. He exhales. This could be worse.

What bothers him most - and it's stupid, he thinks, considering the rest of his body - are the stretch marks. They're nothing compared to the rest of his scars, but they still annoy him, proof that he's been so unkind to his body in the past few months when he’s supposed to have been recovering. The least he could have done, he thinks, is pace himself so the weight didn’t pile on quite so fast.

He tries on a pair of his old jeans, just to see, and manages to get them over his thighs with a lot of squirming, but there's no way he can get them done up, even underneath his belly. He studies himself for a second, taking in all the places the jeans pull taut or bite into his skin, then wriggles out of them. He rummages through his closet until he finds the pair of leather pants he bought for his stupid couples' costume with Laurel six Halloweens ago, the ones he's been imagining will be part of his vigilante suit when he finally gets his ass in gear.

They take even more shimmying and grunting to get into than the jeans, and they're a lot less forgiving when he looks into the mirror. Every curve of his hips and thighs is on display, and even unbuttoned, the waistband squeezes out a bigger pair of love handles than usual. He turns to inspect himself from the back, the side, the leather creaking as he moves - even his ass looks chubby. He checks the tag - size 30 around the waist. He's going to need at least a 34, maybe a 36, he thinks. Do leather pants even run that big?

He wonders if bending over would split them down the seams, but decides against testing it - he might get back down to a size 30 someday. Someday way in the future, at the rate he's going, but maybe eventually he'll learn to calm his nerves without a pizza or too many cheese fries. After all, he has survived stranger things.

\---

He tries to go in cold, he really does. He plans to get there early and sit in the waiting room and take deep breaths or do sudoku or whatever it takes to get himself calm. But as soon as he's in the parking lot, he begins to panic. The names are too similar, what if he triggers himself during the session, it'll be just the two of them in that tiny room and all he'll be able to think about is being tortured and branded and beaten and he'll _freak_ -

And he can't let that happen. He's too fragile, still, to let anyone see him like that, even his therapist.

So he goes for pizza first.

He doesn't stuff himself completely - he maintains enough meager self-control for that. But he gets himself nice and full, gets himself to a good headspace, and then he tries again. He gets to the waiting room with two minutes to spare and shades in a sudoku square so hard he snaps the tip off his pencil.

But when Sam Wilson steps out into the waiting room to call Oliver, absolutely nothing about him is reminiscent of Slade Wilson. Sam Wilson's eyes are so kind, already, in a way that Slade's never could manage to be.

"Hey, Oliver," says Sam, ushering him into his office, which is warm and windowed and cheery. “Come on in.”

“Nice to see you again,” Oliver manages, lowering himself into the seat across from Sam’s desk. His belly twinges a little, and he presses a hand to it.

Sam is watching him as he closes the door, and Oliver shoves his hands beneath his thighs. No need to draw any more attention to his belly than it already gets.

“Nice to see you, too,” says Sam. “I’d been wondering if I’d hear back from you. It’s always harder to readjust than you think it’ll be. And sometimes it’s the easiest things that throw you.”

Oliver nods, squirms.

“Any questions before we begin?” Sam asks, leaning back in his seat.

Oliver pauses. “Everything is confidential here, right?”

Sam nods. “Unless I have reason to believe that you’re a danger to yourself and/or others.”

Oliver thinks about that. “But things I’ve already done, things that have already happened - confidential?”

“Absolutely, unless you commit a crime and I’m called to testify.”

“Okay.” He studies Sam. “There’s a lot of stuff from the island that I … I just need to tell someone. I need someone to tell me what to do with it. How to get past it. But some of it … a lot of it … it’s not good stuff. I had to … I had to survive.” He can hear himself getting desperate, defensive, and he swallows a couple of times, trying to get the taste of shame out of his mouth. “I need to know that you won’t think less of me for that. I wouldn’t … I wouldn’t have done those things if I hadn’t had to. If you can promise me that, I want to stay. I want to work with you on this. But if not …”

Sam’s already nodding, face solemn, eyes warm. “You can count on that. I know a little something about times like those. You do what you have to do in drastic situations.”

Oliver exhales, feels himself deflate. “Okay.”

Sam flips open a legal pad. “You want to tell me about yourself, get us started?”

His tone is gentle, nothing pushy or patronizing. Oliver inhales, exhales, inhales.

“Okay.”  

  



End file.
